The building near Saket Metro station in South Delhi was, by all available evidence, a disaster waiting to happen. In March this year Delhi police had written to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and all civic authorities, warning that the building was allegedly being constructed in violation of norms. But the warnings were logged and the files were acknowledged but No action was reportedly taken by the civic body as reported by ANI. On the evening of May 31, 2026, the building collapsed. The structure, located on Western Marg in the Saidulajab area, housed coaching institutes, cafes and office spaces, and was reportedly undergoing construction work on its upper floor when it came down around 7:35 pm. Six people were killed. Ten were injured. Among the victims were students preparing for the Foreign Medical Graduate examination who had come to study, not to die. What followed was entirely predictable, because it always is. Two MCD engineers were suspended with immediate effect, an FIR was registered and a magisterial inquiry was announced. Delhi’s Chief Minister visited the site and promised strict action. The opposition alleged that the building was originally a three-storey structure on which illegal construction of a fourth and fifth floor had been underway without structural assessment. Leaders pointed out that excavation work for a basement and water tank had weakened the foundation, causing the building to tilt. These are allegations under investigation. But the larger pattern is not in any serious dispute. India does not have a building safety problem. It has a building safety industry, which is a vast, well-oiled economy of officially sanctioned negligence. Here, the construction of dangerous structures, the ignoring of warnings, and the burying of accountability have been perfected into a dark, system without conscience or accountability.
The numbers are extraordinary. Structural collapses in India killed 8,756 people between 2018 and 2022 which amounts to roughly five people every single day. That is not just a statistic. It reflects policy failure announced in corpses. Every year, India loses an average of 2,658 people to different kinds of structural collapses: around seven deaths a day. These are not the victims of earthquakes or monsoons. They are, in most cases, the victims of buildings that should never have been built, structures that should have been stopped, and warnings that were paid to disappear, according to a report in Scroll.in. Delhi had the highest number of structural collapse-related deaths among union territories in that five-year period, while Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra led the dismal count among the states. These are not poor or underdeveloped places. They are India’s most economically dynamic regions that host the country’s commercial capital, its political capital, and some of its most ambitious construction booms. The boom and the body count, it turns out, are not unrelated.
The Saket collapse is recent and raw, but it is not exceptional. It is a chapter in a very long book. In October 2013, a building in the Thane suburb of Mumbai constructed illegally on forest land collapsed killing 74 people. Authorities subsequently confirmed that rampant bribery surrounded the construction of the structure, with developers paying off officials with several lakhs to avoid scrutiny. Police found property documents and over lakhs at the home of a deputy police chief who was arrested for suspected involvement with the developers. Seventy-four people died so that a builder could save on approvals and an official could pocket a few lakhs. That is the arithmetic of blood money, as quoted in Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in June 2022, a four-storey building in Kurla, Mumbai, that had been in poor condition for years, collapsed, sending 19 people to their deaths. The owners were arrested on charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and a contractor who had been housing labourers inside the building while it deteriorated around them was nabbed. What the courts will ultimately do with those arrests and how many years hence, after how many adjournments is a question that India’s justice system has a poor record of answering swiftly.
In May 2024, a billboard in Ghatkopar, Mumbai which was illegal, oversized, inadequately anchored came down during the rains. Seventeen people were killed and more than seventy-five were injured. Billboards had killed people in Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi and Pune in previous years. Courts had issued rulings but the practice continued regardless. In July 2024, a residential building on the outskirts of Surat collapsed following heavy rains killing 7 people and injuring fifteen injured. Government authorities confirmed the building had been constructed illegally in 2017. Imagine an illegal structure stood for seven years, was occupied, and eventually killed people. In April 2025, a residential building collapsed in northeastern Delhi, killing at least eleven people including three children. The area mostly houses migrant workers who have no political weight and legal recourse, but had no choice but to live in the cheapest available structure and trust that someone, somewhere, has checked that it will hold.
In the months before the Saket collapse, a different category of preventable death had been making headlines, exposing not just the construction industry’s contempt for safety but the particular cruelty with which that contempt is administered in Indian cities. 27 years software engineer, Yuvraj Mehta was driving his car in Sector 150, Noida, when the vehicle plunged into an open excavation pit which was about fifty feet deep. It was filled with rainwater, unbarricaded, unlit, and unmarked. He drowned. In the investigation that followed, builder Abhay Kumar of Wishtown Planners and developers Ravi Bansal and Sachin Karnwal were arrested. In Delhi, a sub-contractor was similarly arrested after a twenty-five-year-old biker plunged to his death in an open fourteen-foot pit that had been left without warning signs. The contractor had arrived at the scene, seen the victim lying there, and cold heartedly left: the youth was still alive.
These pits are not accidents. They are, under the National Building Code of India, required to be barricaded, lit and marked. These are baseline human obligations which the minimum standard a society sets when it decides that the person driving home from work at night should not fall into a hole because a builder couldn’t be bothered to put up a sign. The builder couldn’t be bothered. That is the phrase that haunts all of this. What does it take, in India, to build a dangerous structure, ignore a warning, allow an open pit to swallow someone, and walk away? Less than you might think.
An advocacy group founder working on disaster management observed that Indian officialdom has a tendency to ignore signs of danger and wait for situations to get really bad. Only recently have builders in metro cities like Delhi and Mumbai begun to be arrested for causing death by negligence. But across most of India, builders are hardly held accountable. If accountability exists at all, it is largely theatrical. After a collapse, engineers are only suspended and neither dismissed, nor prosecuted. FIRs are registered but conviction rates in cases of this kind are vanishingly low. Inquiries are announced and are not heard from again. A magisterial inquiry often becomes a bureaucratic shelf. The suspended engineer waits out the storm, files a departmental appeal, and in many cases returns to work. The builder, if he has not already fled, hires a lawyer and navigates a justice system that moves at a speed calibrated to his advantage. Building collapses are common in India, where high housing demand and lax regulations have encouraged builders to cut corners, use substandard materials and add unauthorised floors. These three things exist in a relationship of mutual reinforcement that has been allowed to persist because the people who profit from it are not the people who die in it as reported by Global News.
The people who profit from it are builders, contractors, the officials who accept money to approve plans they should not approve or ignore violations they are paid to ignore. The people who die in it: students at coaching centres, migrant workers in rented rooms, software engineers on their way home from work, children on a bridge that reopened too soon. The Morbi suspension bridge in Gujarat reopened in October 2022 after renovation. It collapsed four days later, killing 134 people, many of them children. The bridge’s renovation had been handled by a watchmaking company with no infrastructure expertise. The municipal corporation had handed over management. Nobody had conducted an independent structural assessment before reopening to the public. One hundred and thirty-four people walked onto a bridge that had been approved by no relevant authority and held accountable to no credible standard, and they died.
There is a phrase in common circulation: blood money. It usually refers to compensation paid to the families of victims: the 10 lakh rupees announced at a press conference, the ex-gratia payment that arrives weeks later, both inadequate and unchallenged as the price of a human life. But blood money has another meaning, which goes unspoken in the press conferences and the FIRs and the magisterial inquiries. It is the profit extracted from a transaction in which one party accepts the risk of death and the other party takes the returns. It is the margin on the illegal floor that the builder added without structural assessment. It is the bribe that bought the engineer’s silence. It is the saving on barricades that cost twenty thousand rupees and would have kept Yuvraj Mehta alive. It is the watchmaking company’s contract to renovate a bridge it was not qualified to touch.
Every illegal floor that rises is unreported. Structural certificates are signed by engineers who have never visited the site. Inspections exist only in a register and warning letters are filed and forgotten. Tragedy is a financial transaction, with someone on the profit side and someone unaware of the danger on the loss side. The loss side pays in the only currency that cannot be recovered.
The response to each of these disasters follows a script so familiar it could be automated. Television cameras, senior officials examining the rubble, announcements of inquiry, FIRs filed under Section are all optics. There is the typical social media outrage that lasts until the news cycle. And three months later there is only silence. This silence is not incidental to the problem. It is the problem. The absence of follow-through of the investigation that never concludes, the engineer who quietly resumes his posting, the builder who surfaces in a new project under a slightly different company are is precisely what makes the construction mafia’s economy viable. If the risk of being caught was real, and the risk of conviction after being caught was real, and the risk of meaningful imprisonment after conviction was real, the calculation would change. It has not changed, because none of those risks are, in practice, real. A disaster management expert reportedly noted that India waits for situations to get really bad before acting, and that in cases of buildings and other structures, small cracks need to be addressed before they become catastrophes. This is an observation so obvious it should be embarrassing to have to make. The fact that it needs to be made at all and has been made, repeatedly, after each new pile of rubble is a measure of how completely the system has failed to absorb even its most elementary lessons.
A nation that genuinely values human life will not need to rediscover, after each collapse, that warnings must be acted upon before structures fail rather than after. It would not need to be reminded that an open pit at night requires a barricade. It would not place the renovation of a public bridge in the hands of a watchmaker and call it adequate governance. The question after each collapse should not be about who will compensate the mourning families. Compensation is what you offer when an accident occurs but these deaths are not accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of known risks, reported dangers, and deliberate negligence. The question is: who permitted this to happen, who profited from permitting it, and what will ensure they do not permit it again? It will make a difference only until builders who construct illegally face prosecution that ends in conviction, and not merely arrest that ends in bail. Until officials who ignore written warnings must be charged with culpable homicide rather than be quietly suspended. Investigations should be followed to their bitter end and their conclusions must be made public. Until the compensation press conference is replaced by a sentencing hearing both the rubble and deaths will keep piling up. And India will keep paying with the deaths of citizens for the privilege of calling itself a rising power.
(The writer is Editor-in-Chief, Asia Features News service)